Reward for work done in darker days

Belfast has always been a city which does a nice line in irony. And that great tradition was continued last week with the confirmation that one of the first tangible dividends of the more settled political climate will be the staging of the World Amateur Boxing Championships in the North in 2001. The fact that peace will be rewarded with a festival of pugilism will not go unnoticed among some of the wryest and driest cultural observers in the western hemisphere.

If his precociously developing talent hasn't been snared by the professional promoters by then, Brian Magee is one of the local boxers who could be eyeing a hometown triumph. Earlier this month he joined the long line of outstanding amateurs that this part of Ireland has produced in the past few years by winning a silver medal at the European Amateur Championships in Minsk. Damaen Kelly has already made his initial confident steps in the paid ranks after an outstanding amateur career and Stephen Kirk is another boxer approaching the height of his powers. Modest men all, they don't bluster and brag about their achievements. But for someone like Brian Magee, it is clear that boxing has been a pivot on which his life has turned. His family moved to Belfast when Magee was just 11 after their Lisburn home had been petrol-bombed. In his new west Belfast surroundings it was the celebrated Holy Trinity club that provided much needed stability and solidity. A glittering move through the amateur ranks followed.

Boxing has opened up the world to him and the end of the summer will find him in Kuala Lumpur fighting for Northern Ireland at the Commonwealth Games. And the Catholic Magee will stand shoulder to shoulder on that team with his Protestant team-mate, Kirk, the east Belfast shipyard worker.

The staging of the World Championships here will be recognition of the sterling, unheralded work of the unpaid administrators and coaches who toiled away during the darker days when the thought of Northern Ireland even making the short-list for a top level tournament was frankly laughable.

But much has changed and there are indications that, to borrow a phrase, sport here can now think about boxing its weight when it comes to competing for world sport's prestigious events. Planning for next year's World Cross Country Championships is already at an advanced stage with the delicious prospect of a reborn Sonia O'Sullivan defending her titles on home soil.

Golf's Senior British Open at Royal Portrush has survived the time-tabling nightmare that saw it run in parallel with the very worst excesses of the marching season in July and there is even the whispered prospect that the British Open may not be too far away.

Money will drive the wheels of this movement towards the sporting mainstream and if the current climate persists it seems likely that, in the short term at least, Northern Ireland is going to surf the sporting wave of its new public face. World sporting organisations like nothing better than the safe, low-risk political gesture and administrators will not be slow to appreciate that few things will look more politically correct than awarding an event or a championship to a region hungry for recognition.

Which is where we might run into some problems. Staging a cross country event over one afternoon is one thing as the outdoor venue takes care of itself and the squeeze on hotel beds lasts for only one or two nights. But in an echo of the harsh realities the promoters of Dublin's Olympic Games bona fides were forced to wake up to, the infrastructure here seems woefully ill-equipped to cope with the demands of full scale, international sporting events.

Investment in sport here during the Troubles was of the quick-fix and short term variety. It is not that facilities were not provided - the drive from west Belfast into the city centre will take you past half a dozen well-equipped leisure centres, complete with sports halls, swimming pools and fitness suites.

There was public investment on a level that would seem incredible in the South but these were centres that were built as sops to both unemployment and violence, an effective way of keeping the lid on an otherwise potentially uncontrollable situation. In the real politick that seems certain to follow the Belfast Agreement and the Assembly the continued pouring of public funds into these leisure centres could be regarded as unsustainable in a brave, new world where sport will have to compete with health, transport and the environment for government money.

The individual centres do an admirable job of serving their own catchment areas but will they be incapable of coping with a major event. Where sport comes on the list of priorities of any new administration remains to be seen (and if the experiences of our near neighbours is anything to go by, pretty low down the list looks like the probable answer) but sooner or later it will have to address the serious dearth of an adequate infrastructure or an effective administrative structure.

The national football team plays its home internationals on Linfield's substandard Windsor Park pitch. The Mary Peters athletics complex in south Belfast is woefully under-developed. And the pick of our young swimmers have to fight for training space in cramped inadequate pools.

Add to that a moribund Northern Ireland Sports Council, within which bureaucracy seems to do its level best to cripple initiative, and you have a scenario where sport here looks wholly ill-equipped to meet the opportunities that a peace dividend looks certain to provide.

That would mean a prefect chance to present a modern, progressive face - expressed through new found sporting confidence - would be lost. At a time when the entrenched exclusion of the country's biggest sporting organisation shows the ripples that sport can make in wider society, there has never been a greater need for the case to be made for sporting progress and for sporting inclusion. Brian Magee and Stephen Kirk have shown how it should be done.